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III

 

 

When I got back to the car, the phone was buzzing and the "Message Recorded" light blinked at me. The message was from Candace:

"Gunner, a Truce Team has checked into the Statler-Bills to supervise the election, and get this. One of them's an Arcturan!"

The staff work wasn't so bad, after all, just unpardonably slow. But there wasn't much comfort in that.

I called the hotel and was connected with one of the Truce Team staff—the best the hotel would do for me. The staff man was a colonel who said, "Yes, Mr. Knafti is aware of your work here and specifically does not wish to see you. This is a Truce Team, Mr. Gunnarsen. Do you know what that means, exactly?"

And he hung up on me. Well, I did know what it meant—strictly hands-off, all the way—I simply hadn't known that they would interpret it that rigidly.

It was a kick in the eye, any way I looked at it. Because it made me look like a fool in front of Connick, when I kind of wanted him scared of me. Because Arcturans do, after all, stink—not good public relations at all when your product smells like well-rotted garlic buds a few hundred feet away. I didn't want the voters smelling them.

And most of all because of the inference that I was sure any red-blooded, stubborn-minded, confused voter would draw: Jeez, Sam, you hear about that Arcturan coming to spy on us? Yeah, Charlie, the damn bugs are practically accusing us of rigging the election. Damn right, Sam, and you know what else? They stink, Sam.

Half an hour later I got a direct call from Haber. "Gunner boy! Good God! Oh, this is the reeking end!"

I said, "It sounds to me like you've found out about the Arcturan on the Truce Team."

"You know? And you didn't tell me?"

Well, I had been about to ream him for not telling me, but obviously that wasn't going to do any good. I tried, anyway, but he fell back on his fat ignorance. "They didn't clue me in from Chicago. Can I help that? Be fair now, Gunner boy!"

Gunner boy very fairly hung up.

I was beginning to feel very sleepy. For a moment I debated taking a brisk-up pill, but the mild buzz Connick's liquor had left with me was pleasant enough, and besides, it was getting late. I went to the hotel suite Candace had reserved for me and crawled into bed.

It only took me a few minutes to fall asleep, but I was faintly aware of an odor. It was the same hotel the Truce Team was staying at.

I couldn't really be smelling this Arcturan, Knafti. It was just my imagination. That's what I told myself as I dialed for sleep and drifted off.

 

The pillow-phone hummed, and Candace's voice said out of it, "Wake up and get decent, Gunner. I'm coming up."

I managed to sit up, shook my head, and took a few whiffs of amphetamine. As always, it woke me right up, but at the usual price of feeling that I hadn't had quite enough sleep. Still, I got into a robe and was in the bathroom fixing breakfast when she knocked on the door. "It's open," I called. "Want some coffee?"

"Sure, Gunner." She came and stood in the doorway, watching me turn the Hilsch squirt to full boil and fill two cups. I spooned dry coffee into them and turned the squirt to cold. "Orange juice?" She took the coffee and shook her head, so I just mixed one glassful, swallowed it, tossed the glass in the disposal hamper, and took the coffee into the other room. The bed had stripped itself already; it was now a couch, and I leaned back on it, drinking my coffee. "All right, honey," I said, "what's the dirt on Connick?"

She hesitated, then opened her bag and took out a photofax and handed it to me. It was a reproduction of an old steel engraving headed, in antique script, The Army of the United States, and it said:

 

Be it known to all men that

DANIEL T. CONNICK

ASIN Aj-32880515

has this date been separated from the service of the United States for the convenience of the government; and

be it further known to all men that the conditions of his discharge are

DISHONORABLE

 

"Well, what do you know!" I said. "You see, honey? There's always something."

Candace finished her coffee, set the cup down neatly on a window-sill, and took out a cigarette. That was like her: She always did one thing at a time, an orderly sort of mind that I couldn't match—and couldn't stand, either. Undoubtedly she knew what I was thinking because undoubtedly she was thinking it, too, but there wasn't any nostalgia in her voice when she said: "You went and saw him last night, didn't you? . . . And you're still going to knife him?"

I said, "I'm going to see that he is defeated in the election, yes. That's what they pay me for. Me and some others."

"No, Gunner," she said, "that's not what M & B pay me for, if that's what you mean, because there isn't that much money."

I got up and went over beside her. "More coffee? No? Well, I guess I don't want any, either. Honey—"

Candace stood up, crossed the room, and sat down in a straight-backed chair. "You wake up all of a sudden, don't you? Don't change the subject. We were talking about—"

"We were talking," I told her, "about a job that we're paid to do. All right, you've done one part of it for me—you got me what I wanted on Connick."

I stopped, because she was shaking her head. "I'm not so sure I did."

"How's that?"

"Well, it's not on the fax, but I know why he got his DD. 'Desertion of hazardous duty.' On the Moon, in the U.N. Space Force. The year was 1998."

I nodded, because I understood what she was talking about. Connick wasn't the only one. Half the Space Force had cracked up that year. November. A heavy Leonid strike of meteorites and a solar flare at the same time. The Space Force top brass had decided they had to crack down and asked the U.S. Army to court-martial every soldier who cut and ran for an underground shelter, and the Army had felt obliged to comply. "But most of them got Presidential clemency," I said. "He didn't?"

Candace shook her head. "He didn't apply."

"Um. Well, it's still on record." I dismissed the subject. "Something else. What about these Children?"

Candace put out her cigarette and stood up. "Why I'm here, Gunner. It was on your list. So—get dressed."

"For what?"

She grinned. "For my peace of mind, for one thing. Also for investigating the Children, like you say. I've made you an appointment at the hospital in fifty-five minutes."

You have to remember that I didn't know anything about the Children except rumors. Bless Haber, he hadn't thought it necessary to explain. And Candace only said, "Wait till we get to the hospital. You'll see for yourself."

Donnegan General was seven stories of cream-colored ceramic brick, air-controlled, wall-lighted throughout, tiny asepsis lamps sparkling blue where the ventilation ducts opened. Candace parked the car in an underground garage and led me to an elevator, then to a waiting room. She seemed to know her way around very well. She glanced at her watch, told me we were a couple of minutes early, and pointed to a routing map that was a mural with colored lights showing visitors the way to whatever might be their destination. It also showed, quite impressively, the size and scope of Donnegan General. The hospital had twenty-two fully equipped operating rooms, a specimen and transplant bank, X-ray and radiochemical departments, a cryogenics room, the most complete prosthesis installation on Earth, a geriatrics section, O.T. rooms beyond number . . .

And, of all things, a fully equipped and crowded pediatric wing.

I said, "I thought this was a V.A. facility."

"Exactly. Here comes our boy."

A Navy officer was coming in, hand and smile outstretched to Candace. "Hi, good to see you. And you must be Mr. Gunnarsen."

Candace introduced us as we shook hands. The fellow's name was Commander Whirling; she called him Tom. He said, "We'll have to move. Since I talked to you, there's been an all-hands evolution scheduled for eleven—some high brass inspection. I don't want to hurry you, but I'd like it if we were out of the way . . . this is a little irregular."

"Nice of you to arrange it," I said. "Lead on."

We went up a high-rise elevator and came out on the top floor of the building, into a corridor covered with murals of Disney and Mother Goose. From a sun deck came the tinkle of a music box. Three children, chasing each other down the hall, dodged past us, yelling. They made pretty good time, considering that two of them were on crutches. "What the hell are you doing here?" asked Commander Whitling sharply.

I looked twice, but he wasn't talking to me or the kids. He was talking to a man with a young face but a heavy black beard, who was standing behind a Donald Duck mobile, looking inconspicuous and guilty.

"Oh, hi, Mr. Whitling," the man said. "Jeez, I must've got lost again looking for the PX."

"Carhart," said the commander dangerously, "if I catch you in this wing again, you won't have to worry about the PX for a year. Hear me?"

"Well, jeez! All right, Mr. Whitling." As the man saluted and turned, his face wearing an expression of injury, I noticed that the left sleeve of his bathrobe was tucked, empty, into a pocket.

"You can't keep them out," said Whitling and spread his hands. "Well, all right, Mr. Gunnarsen, here it is. You're seeing the whole thing."

I looked carefully around. It was all children—limping children, stumbling children, pale children, weary children. "But what am I seeing, exactly?" I asked.

"Why, the Children, Mr. Gunnarsen. The ones we liberated. The ones the Arcturans captured on Mars."

And then I connected. I remembered about the capture of the colony on Mars.

Interstellar war is waged at the pace of a snail's crawl, because it takes so long to go from star to star. The main battles of our war with Arcturus had been fought no farther from Earth than the surface of Mars, and the fleet engagement around Orbit Saturn. Still, it had taken eleven years, first to last, from the surprise attack on the Martian colony to the armistice signed in Washington.

I remembered seeing a reconstructed tape of that Martian surprise attack. It was a summer's day—hot—at full noon, ice melted into water. The place was the colony around the Southern Springs. Out of the small descending sun a ship appeared.

It was a rocket. It was brilliant gold metal, and it came down with a halo of gold radiation around its splayed front, like the fleshy protuberance of a star-nosed mole. It landed with an electrical crackle on the fine-grained orange sand, and out of it came the Arcturans.

Of course, no one had known they were Arcturans then. They had swung around the sun in a long anecliptic orbit, watching and studying, and they had selected the small Martian outpost as the place to strike. In Mars gravity they were bipeds—two of their ropy limbs were enough to lift them off the ground-man tall, in golden pressure suits. The colonists came running out to meet them—and were killed. All of them. All of the adults.

The children, however, had not been killed, not that quickly or that easily, at least. Some had not been killed at all, and some of those were here in Donnegan General Hospital.

But not all.

Comprehension beginning to emerge in my small mind, I said, "Then these are the survivors."

Candace, standing very close to me, said "Most of them, Gunner. The ones that aren't well enough to be sent back into normal life."

"And the others?"

"Well, they mostly don't have families—having been killed, you see. So they've been adopted out into foster homes here in Belport. A hundred and eight of them—isn't that right, Tom? And now maybe you get some idea of what you're up against."

There were something like a hundred of the Children in that wing, and I didn't see all of them. Some of them were not to be seen.

Whitling just told me about but couldn't show me the blood-temperature room, where the very young and very bad cases lived. They had a gnotobiotic atmosphere, a little rich in oxygen, a little more humid than the ambient air, plus pressure to help their weak metabolism keep oxygen spread in their parts. On their right, a little farther along, were the small individual rooms belonging to the worst cases of all. The contagious. The incurables. The unfortunates whose very appearance was bad for the others. Whitling was good enough to open polarizing shutters and let me look in on some of those where they lay (or writhed or stood like sticks) in permanent solitary. One of the Arcturan efforts had been transplantation, and the project seemed to have been directed by a whimsical person. The youngest was about three; the oldest in the late teens.

They were a disturbing lot, and if I have glossed lightly over what I felt, it is because what I felt is all too obvious.

Kids in trouble! Of course, those who had been put back into population weren't put back shocking as these. But they would pull at the heartstrings—they even pulled at mine—and every time a foster parent or a foster parent's neighbor or a casual passer-by on the street felt that heartstring tug, he would feel, too, a single thought: The Arcturans did this.

For after killing the potentially dangerous adults, they had caged the tractable small ones as valuable research specimens.

And I had hoped to counteract this with five hundred Arcturan pets!

Whitling had been all this time taking me around the wing, and I could hear in his voice the sound of what I was up against, because he loved and pitied those kids. "Hi, Terry," he said on the sun deck, bending over a bed and patting its occupant on his snow-white hair. Terry smiled up at him. "Can't hear us, of course," said Whitling. "We grafted in new auditory nerves four weeks ago—I did it myself—but they're not surviving. Third try, too. And, of course, each attempt is a worse risk than the one before: antibodies."

I said, "He doesn't look more than five years old." Whitling nodded. "But the attack on the colony was—"

"Oh, I see what you mean," said Whitling. "The Arcturans were, of course, interested in reproduction too. Ellen—she left us a couple of weeks ago—was only thirteen, but she'd had six children. Now this is Nancy."

Nancy was perhaps twelve, but her gait and arm coordination were those of a toddler. She came stumbling in after a ball, stopped, and regarded me with dislike and suspicion. "Nancy's one of our cures," Whitling said proudly. He followed my eyes. "Oh, nothing wrong there," he said. "Mars-bred. She hasn't adjusted to Earth gravity, is all; she isn't slow—the ball's bouncing too fast. Here's Sam."

Sam was a near-teen-ager, giggling from his bed as he tried what was obviously the extremely wearing exercise of lifting his head off the mattress. A candy-striped practical nurse was counting time for him as he touched chin to chest, one and two, one and two. He did it five times, then slumped back, grinning. "Sam's central nervous system was almost gone," Whitling said fondly. "But we're making progress. Nervous tissue regeneration, though, is awfully—" I wasn't listening; I was looking at Sam's grin, which showed black and broken teeth. "Diet deficiency," said Whitling, following my look again.

"All right," I said, "I've seen enough; now I want to get out of here before they have me changing diapers. I thank you, Commander Whitling. I think I thank you. Which way is out?"

 

 

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